It
is terrific news that Saddam Hussein, that human monster,
is now under arrest and will be brought before a court. There
seems little doubt that he meets the criteria for an international
war criminal, and while I’d think it much wiser to send him
to the Hague, it’s difficult to argue that he deserves more
than whatever made-to-order court the United States decides
is appropriate for its old super-creepy ally.

As President Bush said in his brief speech Sunday, “For the
vast majority of Iraqi citizens who wish to live as free men
and women, this event brings further assurance that the torture
chambers and the secret police are gone forever.” I heartily
hope this is true.

That said, it’s time to return to Earth and reality. The TV
talking heads tell us that the 2004 elections and the future
of Iraq were decided this morning when Hussein was found in
a hole. In my humble opinion, that’s perhaps the stupidest
comment since Paris Hilton speculated that Wal-Mart is a store
that sells walls. Catching Saddam was a mop-up operation,
rather like the slaying of his sons a few months back. The
guy was already done for; once a dictator falls from his perch,
the wolves—his own or others—ensure that he will never again
be alpha male in that pack. All the issues surrounding the
occupation of Iraq will be with us tomorrow morning, and the
day after that, and the day after that.

As far as I can tell, catching Saddam is not going to fix
Iraq’s economy, build a functioning democracy, prevent a Sunni-Shiite
civil war, or bring back the Americans and Iraqis who have
died and will continue to die at the checkpoints and home
invasions and while driving their Humvees down the nation’s
roads. Humiliating Hussein with public dental examinations
will hopefully reassure some Iraqis that peace is on the way,
but while it would be nice if his old cronies who may be involved
in the insurgency would lay down their arms, I wouldn’t hold
my breath.

Kenneth Pollack, the scholar who wrote The Threatening
Storm: The Case For Invading Iraq, said on CNN Sunday
that after a stay in Iraq, his impression was that the number-one
fear of the populace is not guerrilla violence but street
crime. The so-called Iraqi Governing Council is now a joke,
with a BBC/Oxford poll showing the public has nearly zero
faith in its effectiveness. Unemployment is above 50 percent.
Nearly half of the first class of the new Iraqi army quit
just days ahead of being deployed. Billions of dollars of
American taxpayer money is being funneled almost directly
to a tiny handful of military contractors and construction
companies like Bechtel and Halliburton.

The American military is the only power broker in the country,
something that has not changed since the first days of the
occupation. In six months, the United States has pledged to
hand over control of the country straight to Iraqis elected
by caucuses, without bringing in the United Nations or other
international bodies to help oversee the transition. The United
States will then be in a position of either having to let
the new Iraqi government make its own mistakes, or treating
it like a puppet regime. Faced with a cleric-dominated and
independent government that may demand the United States withdraw
more quickly or try to prevent privatization of Iraq’s resources,
which do you think the micromanagers at the White House will
choose?

Nor can the capture of Saddam heal the rifts in our own country,
where the lies of this administration have so polarized the
populace that the coming election year promises to be extremely
nasty. The president repeated Sunday that the occupation of
Iraq and the overthrow of Hussein is part of the “War on Terror,”
despite having finally admitted only weeks ago that there
was no evidence linking him with Al Qaeda.

We Americans are now in one of three miserable positions:
We can deny that the administration lied and continues to
lie about Hussein’s ties to terror and the threat he allegedly
posed to the United States; we can get angry about the lies
and afraid of how truth has become a casualty of Sept. 11,
2001; or we can be aware of the lies, but cling to a faith
that good things will come from them, that the ends justify
the means.

We are, none of us, in a very good place. We are encouraged
to believe in an Alice-in-Wonderland world in which Saddam
Hussein is a workable stand-in for Osama bin Laden; that it
is worth sacrificing thousands of American lives to grant
human rights to Iraqis but not to Congolese, Burmese, Liberians,
Uzbekistanis, Syrians, Colombians, North Koreans and other
societies that lack precious natural resources; and that progressives
actually oppose human rights and base their political positions
on an irrational hatred of alleged patriots like George W.
Bush.

If the Iraqi people emerge from this latest stage in their
hard history with a better situation it will be a true wonder.
I sincerely hope my pessimism is unfounded. Yet it is hard
to forget how completely the current U.S. government’s generous
promises echo those made by the British Empire about its occupation
of Baghdad a century ago, or those implied by the assistance,
guns and biological weapons we gave the Hussein regime throughout
the 1980s.

So put the monster back in a new hole, but remember: Hussein
is not Hitler, and these final stages of his political demise
solve very little in a deeply troubled world.